Evaluate InetSoft's Management Status Reporting Tool
Effective status reporting is essential for an organization's progress and should be implemented at all levels ranging from employees to owners and executives. The right reporting tool will make it easy to keep all of an organization's activities in check. Management status reporting represents the critical reporting relationship between managers and employees, as well as managers and executives.
Using an agile reporting tool such as InetSoft's StyleBI provides users an efficient platform to create reports and keep management updated on company and employee progress.
A good management status reporting tool gives managers the flexibility to design and customize reports to fit their individual needs. InetSoft's tool is designed to provide all of the standard reporting features needed by today's organizations, such as the ability to export formats, as well as archiving and localization for multinational businesses.
Benefits of Management Status Reporting with InetSoft
- The flexible data mashup feature lets managers more effectively regulate employee's activities by creating performance reports that includes any and all desired data
- Utilizing a web-based platform opens up new avenues for growth by granting managers access from anywhere in the world
- An easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface makes it easy for managers to build a dashboard for monitoring employee's progress
- Intuitive dashboards facilitate the early detection of problems that need addressing
- Efficient and comprehensive reporting provides full employee accountability and recognition, motivating employees towards higher performance
- Unified view of organizational performance
Basalt Fiber Innovator Switches from Asana to InetSoft for Management Status Reporting
In the fast-evolving world of advanced materials, few niches are as intriguing as basalt fiber composites. Picture volcanic rock spun into ultra-strong, corrosion-resistant fibers used in wind turbine blades, lightweight rebar, electric vehicle components, and fire-safe aerospace interiors. “Basaltica Composites,” a mid-market manufacturer in this space, had built its product development and operations cadence around Asana for task coordination. It worked—until the leadership team demanded more rigorous, multi-source Management Status Reporting that could survive audit-level scrutiny, support weekly executive standups, and tie project work to hard financial and operational outcomes. That’s when they shifted to InetSoft, using it as the backbone for data-mashed, drillable, and refreshable status intelligence. The change was not just a tooling upgrade; it altered how the company managed risk, promised delivery dates, and cash-flowed its growth.
Why Asana Fell Short for Management Status Reporting
Asana is a great collaboration surface: easy assignments, due dates, checklists, and conversations. But for basalt fiber manufacturing, the “truth” of the business doesn’t live in tasks alone. It lives across a messy constellation of systems—ERP for purchase orders and inventory, MES for machine utilization and scrap, PLM for change orders and spec revisions, Jira for firmware in smart pultrusion lines, and spreadsheets for supplier lead times on high-temperature sizings. Executives needed a single status view that fused all these signals, not just a roll-up of task completions. In Asana, status updates tended to be narrative: green/yellow/red with a paragraph. Useful, sure, but not data-backed in a way finance or operations could challenge and verify. When leadership asked questions like “Is this milestone green because tasks are closed, or because the resin supplier actually met the revised lead time?”, the team had to scramble to pull data from elsewhere. The signal-to-noise ratio drifted, and “status theater” crept in.
InetSoft as the Status System of Record
Basaltica chose InetSoft to solve precisely that cross-system reality. Rather than migrating away from Asana entirely, they reframed its role. Asana stayed the place where people planned and executed work. InetSoft became the place where management consumed decisions. The company stitched together connectors to ERP, MES, PLM, Jira, quality databases, and yes, Asana itself, using InetSoft’s data mashup layer. This allowed them to define status not as an opinion but as a computation: a living model that aligns plan, spend, risk, and capacity.
The immediate win was a standardized Executive Program Status dashboard:
- Portfolio Heatmap: RAG state computed from milestone variance, supplier risk, and earned value, not just task closures.
- Critical Path Tracker: Gantt-derived exceptions that overlay MES downtime and vendor slips on top of PLM change orders.
- Financial Tie-In: Forecast vs. actual by project, showing how lead-time extensions ripple into cash conversion cycles.
- Quality Pulse: Defect density and rework hours per line item, tied to material lots and resin batches.
- Throughput Lens: Weekly spindle utilization and pull speed vs. spec, correlated with operator shift patterns.
From Status Theater to Status Truth
The philosophical shift is the most important. Before InetSoft, status reports were crafted. After InetSoft, status reports were computed. A program manager can still annotate, but the underlying color is derived from data the team cannot quietly ignore. If supplier lead time pushes from 21 to 35 days, the dashboard reflects a probabilistic slip, automatically recalculating buffer burn and shipment risk. If the MES flags increased fiber breakage on Line 4, that shows up as a potential yield hit days before the scrap numbers become painful. This kind of data determinism is exactly what a materials manufacturer needs: fewer surprises, faster countermeasures, and a management culture that rewards early honesty.
Practical Mechanics: How They Built It
Basaltica’s operations analytics team began by modeling decisive metrics rather than boiling the ocean:
- Milestone Earned Value (MEV): Derived from PLM states and Asana epics, weighted by cost-of-delay.
- Supply Risk Index (SRI): An aggregate score from ERP lead times, supplier OTIF, and quality incidents.
- Throughput Reliability (TR): A rolling seven-day variance measure from MES spindle uptime and pull speed consistency.
- Budget Fidelity (BF): CAPEX/OPEX alignment to project baselines, including resin price variance and energy intensity.
InetSoft’s mashup layer joined tables from these sources and exposed them as governed views. Program dashboards were then built once and parameterized by project, customer, or product line. The crucial detail: the same semantic definitions feed both executive dashboards and team-level drilldowns. A director sees a red program. A production engineer clicks through to line metrics and sees that breakage rates spiked after a nozzle maintenance delay and an untested sizing blend. One version of the truth, tailored per audience.
Weekly Executive Rhythm, Finally Tight
The Monday executive meeting changed character. Instead of screen-sharing slides, the COO opens the InetSoft portfolio view. Each program’s status is live; commentary is locked to the snapshot taken Sunday night but the underlying numbers can be re-queried on demand. Leaders move from “what’s happening?” to “what do we do?”. Decisions are captured as tags in InetSoft, and auto-synced back into Asana as decision-tasks with owners and deadlines. Meanwhile, finance exports a ready-to-send Management Status Pack—an HTML/PDF bundle with portfolio summary, key risk deltas, variance explanations, and a procurement watchlist. It’s repeatable, audit-friendly, and, candidly, a relief.
Change Management: What Made Adoption Stick
Tools rarely fail on features; they fail on habits. Basaltica ran a three-sprint transition:
- Coexistence: Asana remains the tactical planner. InetSoft mirrors core fields but restricts editing to data owners. Early dashboards focus on “pain-killer” use cases: supplier slippage and critical path clarity.
- Go/No-Go Gatekeeping: Program gates (PDR, CDR, PPAP) require InetSoft snapshots. No snapshot, no gate. This cemented trust in computed status and aligned incentives.
- Retrospectives with Data: Post-mortems use InetSoft playback to compare planned vs. actual critical paths, correlate downtime causes, and quantify cost-of-delay. Lessons turn into kaizen experiments, not opinions.
Results That Matter
Within two quarters, Basaltica reported fewer late-stage surprises in new product introduction. Supplier-related delays didn’t vanish—this is real manufacturing—but they were surfaced earlier with clearer mitigation options: alternate specs, expedite thresholds, or re-sequenced builds. Engineering change orders moved faster because PLM status was visible next to financial impact. The CFO got a more accurate forecast of cash usage tied to resin and energy volatility. Perhaps the most telling outcome: executives stopped asking for slide decks. Management Status Reporting became a living service rather than a monthly art project.
